Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Project Seal: "Tsunami Bomb" papers declassified

While I think a natural cause to the Sumatra tsunami remains the most likely explanation - Mother Nature gives great plausible deniability - the story of Project Seal is further proof that the military has a different take than many of us on what is unthinkable. And this was thinkable 60 years ago.

Even among dissidents and the newly bestirred, there are many eyes squeezed shut to the ongoing presumption of the Pentagon to fold forces of the natural world into its mandate. I can understand why. It's scary as hell to doubt the natural provenance of such tremendous forces, and to suggest a human hand is to invite the harshest ridicule. How fortunate for the Pentagon.

Here are two stories, now nearly five years old, from The New Zealand Herald of June 30, 2000 (and thanks to Ken for the links):

Top-secret wartime experiments were conducted off the coast of Auckland to perfect a tidal wave bomb, declassified files reveal.

An Auckland University professor seconded to the Army set off a series of underwater explosions triggering mini-tidal waves at Whangaparaoa in 1944 and 1945.

Professor Thomas Leech's work was considered so significant that United States defence chiefs said that if the project had been completed before the end of the war it could have played a role as effective as that of the atom bomb.

Details of the tsunami bomb, known as Project Seal, are contained in 53-year-old documents released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Papers stamped "top secret" show the US and British military were eager for Seal to be developed in the post-war years too. They even considered sending Professor Leech to Bikini Atoll to view the US nuclear tests and see if they had any application to his work.

He did not make the visit, although a member of the US board of assessors of atomic tests, Dr Karl Compton, was sent to New Zealand.

"Dr Compton is impressed with Professor Leech's deductions on the Seal project and is prepared to recommend to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that all technical data from the test relevant to the Seal project should be made available to the New Zealand Government for further study by Professor Leech," said a July 1946 letter from Washington to Wellington.

Professor Leech, who died in his native Australia in 1973, was the university's dean of engineering from 1940 to 1950.

News of his being awarded a CBE in 1947 for research on a weapon led to speculation in newspapers around the world about what was being developed.

Though high-ranking New Zealand and US officers spoke out in support of the research, no details of it were released because the work was on-going.

Tsunami experts believe a bomb secretly tested off the coast of Auckland 50 years ago could be developed to devastating effect.

University of Waikato researchers believe a modern approach to the wartime idea tested off Whangaparaoa could produce waves up to 30m high.

Dr Willem de Lange, of the Department of Earth Sciences, said studies proved that while a single explosion was not necessarily effective, a series of explosions could have a significant impact.

"It's a bit like sliding backwards and forwards in a bath - the waves grow higher," Dr de Lange said yesterday.

He was responding to a Weekend Herald report of experiments at Whangaparaoa in 1944-45 to create a tidal wave bomb. The top-secret work by the late Professor Tom Leech was detailed in 53-year-old papers released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

...

"You can't confine the energy. Once the explosion gets big enough, all of its energy goes into the atmosphere and not into the water. But one of the things we discovered was if you had a series of explosions in the same place, it's much more effective and can produce much bigger waves."

526 Comments:

I guess our new rule of thumb should be any time the mainstream media says an idea is a conspiracy theory, we should take the idea very seriously. In fact, perhaps conspiracy theory is really code for "we're covering the government's ass on this".

it's an intriguing idea, but how do you fool the worldwide scientific community? well if I wanted to start an argument with myself I'd check out an old controversy about an australian earthquake a few years ago. seems the epicentre was in a huge chunk of outback owned by that wierd japanese cult of subway/ricin fame. there was speculation at the time it was in reality a nuclear test explosion? go figure.

it's an intriguing idea, but how do you fool the worldwide scientific community? well if I wanted to start an argument with myself I'd check out an old controversy about an australian earthquake a few years ago. seems the epicentre was in a huge chunk of outback owned by that weird japanese cult of subway/ricin fame. there was speculation at the time it was in reality a nuclear test explosion? go figure.

On November 28, 2004 Reuters reported that during a three day span, 169 whales and dolphins beached themselves in Tasmania, an island off the southern coast of mainland Australia. Senator Bob Brown from Australia states that "sound bombing" or seismic tests of ocean floors to test for oil and gas had been recently carried out near the sites of the Tasmanian beachings.

According to Jim Cummings of the Acoustic Ecology Institute, seismic surveys utilising airguns have been taking place in mineral-rich areas of the world's oceans since 1968. Among the areas that have experienced the most intense survey activity are the North Sea, the Beaufort Sea(off Alaska's North Slope), and the Gulf of Mexico; areas around Australia and South America are also current hotspots of activity.

The impulses created by the release of air from arrays of up to 24 airguns create low frequency sound waves powerful enough to penetrate up to 40km below the seafloor. The "source level" of these soundwaves is generally over 200dB (and often 230dB or more), roughly comparable to a sound of at least 140dB-170dB in air.

According to the Australian Conservation Foundation, these 200dB-230dB shots from the airguns are fired every ten seconds or so, from 10 metres below the surface, 24 hours a day, for 2 week periods of time, weather permitting.

These types of tests are known to affect whales and dolphins, whose acute hearing and use of sonar is very sensitive.

On December 24, 2004 there was a magnitude 8.1 earthquake more than 800km southeast of Tasmania near New Zealand, with a subsequent aftershock 6.1 a little later in the morning that same day.

Then on December 26 the magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck leading to the devastating tsunami that killed more than 300,00 people.

On December 27, 20 whales beached themselves 180km west of Hobart on the southern island of Tasmania.

Interestingly, the locations of the whale beachings over the previous 30 days correlates with the same general area. Then 2 days after the Australian tectonic plate shifted, the 9.0 earthquake shook the coast of Indonesia.

There is strong evidence suggesting oil exploration activities have induced earthquakes in the past, although a link is yet to be established in this case.

A paper "Seismicity in the Oil Field" by Russian academics admit,"Scientists have observed that earthquakes can be triggered by human action... Some geophysicists, including the authors of this article, believe that if the natural tectonic regime had been taken into account during the planning of hydrocarbon recovery, the earthquakes might have been avoided."

This is a sobering admission when we consider that some geologists say the Australian quake was the likely trigger for the Indonesian quake.

You do have an interesting theory. However, it is hard to believe that the United States would do such a thing to Indonesia. Youldnt it be smarter to use it somewhere that could (oops) accidentally eliminate a competiter. I would personally use it on china. With there economy exploding like the general liberal media over that tsunami, we may as well start learning chinese.